Cultural Pluralism

POLITICAL Riley / DEFENDING THEORY CULTURAL / February 2002 PLURALISM
DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM Within Liberal Limits

JONATHAN RILEY Tulane University
he late Sir Isaiah Berlins moral and political thought, particularly its intimations of a pluralistic liberalism that assigns immense importance to individual liberty in a world of conflicting and irreducible values or systems of values (i.e., cultures), has recently begun to attract increased scholarly attention.1 Many commentators remain skeptical of his contribution, however, and some even question whether he is really committed to liberalism. George Kateb, for example, argues that Berlin seems more committed to a nonrational religious outlook that celebrates human creativity and diversity without privileging basic liberal rights:
For him, religion is the greatest source of energy in human affairs, the greatest source of that creativity that issues in endless profusion of ways of life, not only in the creativity of great poetry, music, and painting. . . . [He] wants to defend the human stature, and he is sincerely convinced that one key to its defense must lie in aesthetic attitudes and senti2 ments, whatever the cost to morality and truth [italics added].
In Katebs view, Berlin is not a liberal rationalist but rather an aesthete who prizes cultural pluralism as a beautiful or sublime manifestation of human creativity, whatever the cost to decency and basic rights. This essay takes issue with Katebs claim that Berlin is offering an aesthetic defense of cultural pluralism, as well as with a second claim (pressed by John Gray3 and also considered by Kateb) that Berlin is committed to pluralism as such (as opposed to its cumulative beauty or sublimity) because
AUTHORS NOTE: Earlier versions of the essay were presented at an October 2000 seminar of the Center for Human Values, Princeton University; a November 2000 seminar of the Politics, Law and Society Program of University College London; and a December 2000 seminar of Department of Philosophy, Tulane University. My thanks go to the members of these seminars for their lively discussions. I am particularly grateful to George Kateb, Dale Jamieson, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments, references, and advice.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 30 No. 1, February 2002 68-96 2002 Sage Publications
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Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
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there are no universal moral or rational standards for grading or ranking different cultures. Rather than interpret his thought in either of these ways, I shall argue that Berlin is better seen as a liberal rationalist, though a rationalist who emphasizes the inability of reason to resolve all conflicts of values. His pluralism is grounded in his peculiar rationalism, not in some nonrational religious or romantic nostalgia for creativity and diversity.4 In the course of my argument, two sorts of rationalist defenses of suitably limited cultural pluralism, not considered by Kateb (or Gray), are introduced and discussed. Either of these might be attributed to Berlin, although it is not entirely clear from his writings which of them he might support. The two defenses differ only in respect of the assumed relationship between aesthetics and morality, which he leaves ambiguous but which Kateb has discussed to illuminating effect in the pages of this journal.5 I shall begin by examining critically the aesthetic defense of cultural pluralism that Kateb attributes to Berlin.
I. THE AESTHETIC DEFENSE Kateb attributes to Berlin an aesthetic defense . . . of radical cultural pluralism without insisting that it is the only way to interpret Berlins work: Berlin himself may have dismissed my attribution and thought that I had taken improper interpretative liberties with his work.6 The key terms of Katebs attribution require clarification, which he duly provides. By aestheticism, he says,
I mean, first, the disposition to look or hunt for beauty (and sublimity), in matters present to the senses or to the mind; and second, the disposition to regard some inherently non-aesthetic phenomena [such as social customs and ways of life] as more or less aesthetic phenomena, and therefore to justify these non-aesthetic phenomena as we justify manifestly aesthetic phenomenanamely, by their imputed beauty (or sublimity).
The aesthete or aesthetician prizes artworks and putative artworks above all else for their beauty. Indeed, he or she considers other values, like morality or truth or usefulness, as irrelevant to the appreciation [of beauty].7 Even at this preliminary stage, it is worth remarking that Katebs depiction of aestheticism, as being unconcerned with considerations of morality or rationality, is contestable, despite its familiarity. I shall raise doubts about it later in the essay. For now, I note merely that if aesthetics and morality are independent of one another, it follows that moral evil and injustice can with consistency be glorified or even practiced as something beautiful (and sub-
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POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002
lime). In Katebs view, people and thinkers do often demonstrate (whether consciously or unconsciously) that they desire to elevate aesthetic ideals above moral good: the hostility of conscious and unconscious aestheticism to morality often is, in sum, great.8 Admittedly, much of the problem is the result of unconscious aestheticism, he thinks, where people are more or less unaware of their aesthetic motivations and the resulting immorality:
the human record seems to indicate that most of the wrong that has originated in aesthetic cravings for the beautiful and the sublime has resulted from indeliberate aestheticism. In the grip of indeliberate aestheticism, people act immorally, unconsciously, and, as it 9 were, innocently.
But there is also deliberate philosophical aestheticism, where the aesthetic relation to morality is more or less frankly contemplated and where morality does not always come out on top.10 The moral danger usually comes, he tells us, when people direct their aestheticism toward human social phenomena, not toward nature (ordinarily) or toward art (no matter how morally or quasi-morally objectionable the content).11 Among those thinkers who direct their aestheticism toward social phenomena and get so carried away that they deliberately treat morality as subordinate to the pursuit of beauty and sublimity, he claims, are Burke (at least in the Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790]), perhaps Nietzsche and Hegel, and admirers of fascism such as Yeats, Pound, and Wyndham Lewis.12 Of course, to properly describe these thinkers as getting carried away by aesthetic considerations, it must be accepted that aesthetic judgment is independent of morality so that immoral human social phenomena can continue to be admired as beautiful (and sublime). But it is by no means obvious that such a view must be accepted. Remarkably, the view is popularly attributed even to Kant, whose conception of aesthetics is often labeled as formalism in the sense that beauty is said to be a function of the form of an object as opposed to its contentthe design of a painting as opposed to its colors, the structure of a musical composition as opposed to the tones of its instrumentation, and, by extension, the style of a way of life but not its moral content.13 As Paul Guyer points out, however, Kant seems in fact to have rejected this sort of formalism and the implication that aesthetics is independent of morality.14 In any case, I shall for convenience refer to Katebs conception of aesthetic judgment as the received view or the formalistic view. It says that the appreciation of beauty (and sublimity) is unrelated to moral reasoning and thus potentially hostile to it.15 Assuming for the sake of argument that Berlin accepts this formalism, his radical brand of aestheticism has a second aspect, according to Kateb. It goes
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so far as to deny that different artworks or cultures can be graded or compared in terms of their beauty (and sublimity). For him, Kateb says,
the realm of the aesthetic and of the putatively aesthetic is made up of phenomena that demand and deserve not to be compared, one to another, but to be admired, each one, in itself, for itselfto be advanced as both excellent and sufficient. Ranking artworks or 16 cultures is out of order philosophically.
It is this distinctive incomparability thesis that is the heart of the aesthetic defense. Radical cultural pluralism just is the doctrine that different cultures are incommensurably valuable, where the idea of incommensurability . . . means that there can be no common aesthetic measure that allows us to compare and rank all those things and entities that we perceive and admire because we take an aesthetic perspective on them.17 It is worth remarking that Kateb, like Gray, equates incommensurability with incomparability: no attempt is made to wriggle out of the radical pluralist doctrine by claiming that incommensurably valuable cultures can still reasonably be compared and graded from within the aesthetic perspective despite the lack of any common measure of worth. Unlike many others, including Charles Larmore18 and William Galston,19 who do seek to avoid radical pluralism by advancing such a claim, Kateb insists that Berlins aesthetic attitude precludes the judging or ranking of artworks or putative artworks like cultures:
[Berlin] actually renounces aesthetic judgment because it is potentially censorious. Rather, his aesthetic counsel to us is to look for the coherence of a culture, which is its style, and also to isolate particulars for praise and admiration. To say that cultures are incommensurably valuable is not to say that they are equally valuable. That still would be to retain the mentality of grading and ranking. We should rather see cultures as equally 20 needed, not for a teleological purpose, but to show how extensive human creativity is.
This leads to a third aspect of Berlins radical aestheticism. In addition to considering aesthetic appreciation to be independent of moral and epistemic considerations, Kateb suggests, Berlin considers aesthetic values to be incommensurable with the values of morality and truth so that the latter values cannot reasonably be said to outweigh aesthetic values (or vice versa). In short, Berlin subscribes to a double incommensurability.21 For him, different artworks or cultures are incomparable, one to another, in terms of beauty, and, moreover, standards of beauty are incomparable with the standards of morality and truth: beauty, morality, and truth are incommensurably valuable, just as, within the realm of beauty, not only art but whole ways of life are
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incommensurably valuable.22 The point is that for Berlin the claims of morality and truth are [aesthetically] irrelevant [in quite a strong sense] as opposed to secondary and fit to be subordinated for the sake of [permitting] aesthetic appreciation of a way of life.23 As he explains, Berlin could not consistently uphold the overall idea of incommensurability and still assert that the claims of beauty are greater than the claims of morality and truth.24 Thus, to consistently uphold the aesthetic defense of pluralism, Berlin must be interpreted as claiming that the aesthetic realm of values is not only separate from, but also incomparable with, the realms of morality and truth:
The entire aesthetic realm is separate from other realms and has responses and receptivity to it that are its own; within that realm, grading and ranking mistakenly hinder our generous and sympathetic appreciation. Aesthetic incommensurability in this double sense is thus crucial for the defense of cultural pluralism and, with it, for the defense of 25 human stature.
Kateb is certainly aware that his aesthetic reading of Berlins thought is provocative and at odds with some of what Berlin actually says. But he persists in his reading and tells us what he thinks is really happening when Berlin says that cultures and ways of life are incommensurably valuable.26 In his view, Berlin is asserting that every culture has its own peculiar essence or distinctive style, which reflects a set of answers that its people have given of their own free will to certain fundamental religious or metaphysical questions.27 The answers are usually systemized and constitute a constellation of beliefs or values that even if not perfectly consonant theoretically or actually consistent, are not individually isolated. Laws, customs, institutions, and policy tendencies all flow from this set of values: the constellation yields a net achievement, which is a style that shows itself in a societys principal activities. Thus, for Berlin, undetermined beliefs organize and stamp a culture, and these beliefs are as various as the creative genius of grouped humanity can make them.28 Kateb goes on to emphasize that Berlin insists that these organizing beliefs, these fundamental principles or commitments, are beyond the reach of epistemological criticism, just as their enacted consequences are beyond moral judgment. For Berlin, these beliefs apparently deserve to be appreciated, whatever their content, as the distinctive creation of a particular group of human beings. If Kateb is right about this, Berlins aestheticism amounts to a strategy to get us to think that epistemological and moral criticism is out of place when we apprehend cultures:
If we see them as like aesthetic objects, unitary and individuated, we must be led by the perception of their beauty and sublimity, when we contemplate them, to the celebration
Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM of human creativity and then to the defense of human stature. For this sequence to be possible, Berlin must mean that even if there is universalist or cross-cultural truth or morality, it is irrelevant. His further implication must be that the human stature cannot depend 29 on our ability to ascertain truth or achieve justice.
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It can hardly come as a surprise that Kateb is resolutely opposed to this aesthetic defense of cultural pluralism that he attributes to Berlin. I insist on the supremacy of moral considerations, he says; to think otherwise is to invite or endorse barbarism.30 In his view, human dignity is comprised of at least two components, namely, human stature and human status. Unlike the aesthete, who ties human stature to valuable, unpredictable creativity, especially that creativity that is either manifestly aesthetic or (supposedly) lends itself to aestheticized appreciation, he argues that the discovery of truth, whether in science or experience or philosophy, should be sufficient to defend the human stature.31 Not essential to the defense is human creativity as shown in the formation of numerous undetermined ways of life, which the observer wishes to regard like works of art.32 The other component of human dignity, the status of the individual, requires that gross forms of oppression must be avoided; more positively, fundamental rights must be respected. In short, for Kateb, morality and truth, not beauty, are essential to human dignity: truth is enough for the human stature, while justice is required to recognize the status of individuals.33 Even if an aesthetic perspective on the human stature is adopted, Kateb continues, the aesthetic claims are surely comparable with the moral claims of individual status when conflicts arise: individual status must prevail over human stature because the claims of morality are supreme.34 He also reveals hostility to the aesthetic perspective to the extent that it is incompatible with the discovery of truth: then, too, when the human stature is made to rest on the energies released by untruth, it is compromised. Indeed, he tells us that
it is a profound mistake to carry the analogy between a work of art and a culture (or way of life) as far as to place a culture entirely in the aesthetic realm. . . . A way of life is not made up of harmless rituals and routines, but of relations of power that beg to be 35 assessed. Aesthetic appreciation should not replace practical reason.
Katebs powerful critique leaves the aesthetic defense of pluralism in tatters. If Berlin relies on such a defense, his pluralistic liberalism must be dismissed as incoherent since illiberal ways of life cannot reasonably be judged as inferior to liberal ones from within his aesthetic perspective. Grading or ranking of different cultures, one to another, is ruled out. But is the aesthetic reading really the most persuasive interpretation of Berlins work?
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Berlin does insist that the greatest artworks and artists are incommensurable, one to another, in terms of beauty (and sublimity). He says, for example, that the greatest artists [including Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven] are not commensurable. . . . It is simply impossible to compare these people. Moreover, he does seem to view the aesthetic realm as independent of, and potentially in conflict with, the moral realm, as when he says that Wagners anti-Semitism is irrelevant to the value of his art.37 By typically suggesting that the pure aesthete or aesthetician properly does not care about moral considerations when he or she evaluates an artwork or putative artwork in terms of its beauty, Berlin arguably adopts what I have called the formalistic view that there is no relation between aesthetics and morality. Even so, he does not say that all artists and artworks are incommensurable, one to another, in terms of beauty (and sublimity). Only the greatest are incommensurable, one to another. This leaves open the possibility that at least some artworks can reasonably be judged to be more beautiful or sublime than at least some others. Indeed, Berlin often says that some artists are greater than others, implying that the workspoetry, novels, music, and so forthof the one group are more beautiful or sublime than the works of the second. He seems to think that there are common standards of aesthetic judgment, even if those standards do not allow us to grade or rank all artworks or putative artworks, one to another. Moreover, it is far from obvious that he makes the profound mistake of treating a whole culture or way of life as if it were a purely aesthetic phenomenon. In particular, it is unclear why he should be read as concluding that the organizing beliefs of any culture are beyond moral assessment, and Kateb does not venture an explanation. Some might speculate that Berlin draws such a conclusion from his focus on the mystery of creative genius, which he apparently thinks defies scientific explanation and is simply a matter of free will uncontaminated by external determinants. It does seem plausible that if a societys fundamental commitments are regarded as the spontaneous product of some innate spark peculiar to its people, some unique creative spirit that cannot be crushed by any degree of oppression short of complete annihilation, as Herder may have thought,38 then the members of society are not morally responsible for their fundamental commitments and cannot properly be condemned for their customs and activities. After all, the people do not choose their peculiar creative nature and cannot control the spontaneous eruptions of that vital force. The creative genius is beyond rational restraint precisely because nobody can understand how it works or how its products are determined. Yet Berlin typically does not pursue this route to justify adopting an exclusive aesthetic outlook toward cultures such that any culture is exempt from moral assessment. Rather, he
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generally argues in a contrary direction. His considered view seems to be that if determinism were true, in which case human creativity must in principle be explicable in terms of psychological laws that relate the phenomenon to circumstances which are external to the mind, then all talk of moral responsibility would be vacuous.39 By implication, even if we can view any culture as an artwork, moral responsibility still attaches to its people for their undetermined fundamental beliefs and the style displayed by their laws, customs, institutions, and policies. This may cast some doubt on the claim that Berlin adopts (at least deliberately) an aesthetic perspective from within which he ignores moral and epistemic considerations.40 If cultural pluralism is to be defended, another strategy is apparently necessary. Moreover, that other defense of pluralism must pay due regard to the superior value of morality and practical reason in comparison to the worth of aesthetic appreciation in cases of conflict. These considerations may seem to force us to abandon Berlins work, given Katebs aesthetic reading of it. As already indicated, however, Kateb himself generously allows that Berlins work supplies abundant elements for multiple interpretations.41 Unfortunately, the only other reading that Kateb considers has (by his own admission) even less appeal than the aesthetic one has as a defense of cultural pluralism, at least for liberals (among whom Berlin clearly wishes to be classified).
II. THE ANTIUNIVERSALIST DEFENSE Kateb also attributes to Berlin a second defense of cultural pluralism, which he calls the antiuniversalist defense. This alternative nonaesthetic strategy proceeds by way of denying universal standards of truth and morality, he informs us, and defends incommensurably valuable cultural diversity as such, rather than the cumulative sublimity of such diversity.42 It may be difficult to see at first how this nonaesthetic strategy differs from its aesthetic counterpart, given the idea of double incommensurability that the latter involves. The difference seems to be as follows. The aesthetic defense never denies universal standards of morality and truth but rather holds them to be irrelevant to the appreciation of beauty. It sees the aesthetic realm as a separate realm whose values are incomparable with the values of truth or morality. Incommensurability is thereby grounded in the aesthetic outlook, which excludes all appeals to truth or morality. In contrast, the nonaesthetic defense does deny universal standards of truth and morality, independently of any realm of beauty. The thesis of incommensurability thereby becomes a
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first principle, with devastating effects on practical judgment: in the absence of universal standards [of truth and morality], each culture stands in itself, valuable in itself, free of criticism on the basis of universal standards, and really not to be judged at all by an outsider.43 No such devastation is implied by the aesthetic defense, which does not extend the idea of incommensurability inside the realms of morality and truth. The antiuniversalist reading seems to be the interpretation of Berlins work favored by Gray. Kateb is sensitive to the fact that this antiuniversalist defense of cultural pluralism is in tension with Berlins repeated references to a universal or near-universal conceptual and moral horizon, that is, a transcultural core of concepts and categories (including moral concepts and categories) that may be regarded as definitive of the idea of humanity as such. Like Gray, however, he seems perplexed by this universalist element of Berlins thought, and says that it is practically invisible when Berlin discusses pluralism.44 After asserting rather boldly that Berlin does not allow near-universalism to shape his pluralism, he quickly moves on. I shall return to this particular assertion in due course because I think that Kateb may have been too quick in this instance. Assuming for the sake of argument that Berlins near-universalism does not constrain his cultural pluralism, Kateb also firmly rejects the nonaesthetic strategy, which he says boils down to relativism: whatever he says, Berlin is a relativist [if he is correctly interpreted as endorsing the nonaesthetic defense]. His extension of the incommensurability thesis to whole ways of life, when done non-aesthetically, is relativism.45 Although he enters some apparent qualifications, Kateb refuses to back away from this charge that the nonaesthetic defense amounts to relativism and thus deserves to be rejected as flying in the face of universal standards of truth and morality that are immeasurably more valuable than any other social commitments.46 In his opinion, the root of the difficulty is that the nonaesthetic use of the idea of incommensurability to defend cultural pluralism rests on a mistaken analogy between cultures, each of which is measurably valuable, and human individuals, each of whom is not: the deep trouble is that Berlin sometimes conceives of each culture as an individual, an existential unit, with all the immeasurable value that only persons possess.47 Kateb believes that
only philosophers with some high theoretical ambition invoke the idea of incommensurability when they speak of whole societies or cultures or ways of life, and claim that it is only fair to judge them by their own standards. And only societies thought 48 deplorable or even worthless by everybody else could possibly find solace in this idea.
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He gives his dagger a final thrust by questioning whether Berlin as an advocate of incommensurability can consistently condemn any society, including Nazi Germany.49 As he points out, Berlin appeals to universal or near-universal standards of morality and truthfulness to justify his condemnation of the Nazi way of life. But in making this appeal Berlin is abandoning the thesis of incommensurability, Kateb complains, and knows he is abandoning it even though he is reluctant to admit this:
The Nazis, but years after their defeat, compel him explicitly to reintroduce universal standards belatedly and in an improvised, almost sheepish manner. Even so, his remarks indicate as clearly as any lengthy exposition that the thesis of the incommensurable value of ways of life is untenable, certainly for anyone straining [as Berlin did] to refuse the 50 available temptation of relativism.
III. A DIFFERENT APPROACH It emerges that Kateb rejects the aesthetic and nonaesthetic defenses of cultural pluralism that he attributes to Berlin. He thinks that what moves Berlin most profoundly is the aesthetic strategy and that the aesthetic strategy is stronger in some respects than the second, anti-universalist strategy.51 The aesthetic strategy, for example, does not have to pretend to call untruth by the name of relative truth or wickedness by the name of relative morality. But the more important point is that, for Kateb, the thesis of incommensurably valuable cultures is indefensible on either strategy. He is clearly wedded to common standards of truth and morality, which he sees as being incompatible with Berlins endorsement of cultural pluralism:
Berlin appears to me to be, despite his liberalism, unaware that human dignity involves not only the stature of humanity, but alsoand I would say more importantlythe status of each individual person, a status that only the recognition of individual rights can fully 52 protect. This should be the moral aim of every culture.
With due respect, it appears to me that Berlin, despite his advocacy of cultural pluralism, is aware of the preeminent importance of the status of each individual person, a status that only the recognition of individual rights can fully protect. If he were not, I would certainly agree that he should be classified as at best a half-hearted liberal, a liberal with only part of his soul.53 Elsewhere, I have argued at length that Berlins work is best interpreted as a pluralistic version of liberal rationalism.54 Without repeating all of the details of the argument, I shall indicate in the remainder of this essay how my read-
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ing leads to at least two other defenses of cultural pluralism, one or another of which may be attributed to Berlin. These defenses, which are not considered by Kateb (or Gray), are not defenses of unlimited cultural pluralism but rather of cultural pluralism within fairly broad liberal limits. Crucial to both is the claim that, for Berlin, it is rational to believe that a common moral horizon, including moral values that are at least minimally liberal insofar as they prescribe the protection of some set of basic human rights, is of such immense importance for any decent human life that it places rigid constraints on how much pluralism is permissible. All decent cultures or ways of life share these minimally liberal values. Any culture that does not exhibit them is vetoed as indecent. It does not count as a way of life that is compatible with our common humanity. The common horizon constitutes what Galston refers to as a floor of basic moral decency for individual lives and for societies, roughly corresponding to H.L.A. Harts conception of the minimum content of natural law.55 In Galstons view, value pluralism itself provides a rational basis for the common horizon. Pluralism is thereby seen as a comprehensive philosophical doctrine that advances multiple truth-claims about the actual structure of the moral universe. It is much more than the claim that there are plural conflicting and incommensurable values (and systems of values, i.e., cultures). In contrast, I view the common horizon, discovered by rational methods, as providing a rational foundation for pluralism within reasonable limits. Unlike Galston, Larmore, and others who regard value pluralism as a comprehensive philosophy, I view it merely as one element of Berlins peculiar version of liberal rationalism. As Lukes suggests, Berlins argument for pluralism is shaped and qualified by a counter-argument in favor of liberal rationalism: it is a pluralism intended to be compatible with the absolute, overriding, and universal value of liberty, the existence of a common human nature, rational criticism, and the tractability of many but not all value conflicts in public and private life.56
IV. LIMITED CULTURAL PLURALISM It is striking that Kateb in effect presents us with only three options, namely, the aesthetic defense of unlimited cultural pluralism, the nonaesthetic defense of same, and what might be called a nonaesthetic defense of common principles of morality and truth that are sufficiently powerful to identify a single best culturenot necessarily a culture organized around a single fundamental value such as general welfare, however, but perhaps one in which plural basic values are brought into a reasonable balance.
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Yet these three are not the only options. Moreover, each of the three is open to serious objection. The aesthetic defense, for example, is arguably too weak in some respects and too strong in others. On the one hand, it asserts that there are no common standards of aesthetic judgment if we take seriously the mystery and variety of human creativity. I have already suggested in the first section that this assertion is too strong even for Berlin. Indeed, although Berlin might not agree, perhaps there is a common aesthetic horizon below which ways of life ought to be considered ugly, tasteless, and degrading by all reasonable human beingsand are considered thus by most people across a broad range of civil societies. Perhaps a barbaric way of life committed to kidnapping, torture, and murder of the innocent cannot reasonably be admired as being beautiful even to a minimum degree. As Marcia Eaton asks, Would one not be puzzled to hear a person insist that, although evil, the gas chambers used by Nazi Germans to commit genocide were nonetheless quite beautiful?57 Even Nazis themselves may have considered their activities an ugly business, if they thought about such matters at all, made necessary only by the intolerable presence of supposedly inhuman strangers within their midst. On the other hand, because the aesthetic idea of incommensurability does not reach inside the realms of truth and morality, practical reason is apparently not affected by it. Even people who claim that aesthetics is independent of morality can thus avoid endorsing unlimited cultural pluralism by stepping outside, and ignoring, the separate aesthetic realm altogether. This aspect of the aesthetic defense makes it seem too weak. The ramifications of its idea of incommensurability are too easy to escape. Aesthetic considerations might simply be dismissed to arrive at complete and consistent moral rankings of different cultures, one to another. Turning to the antiuniversalist defense of unlimited pluralism, it does seem to boil down to relativism, as Kateb argues. As such, it arguably contradicts certain minimum standards of truth, morality, and perhaps even beauty comprising a basic floor of decency, taste, and humanity, which ought to be accepted as reasonable by every human beingand is in fact accepted by virtually all people across a broad range of civil societies. Again, there are barbaric ways of life that are reasonably seen, and commonly recognized, as falling below a minimum moral threshold, making them truly unfit for human beings.58 As for the nonaesthetic defense of universal standards of truth and morality in terms of which all cultures can be graded and ranked, one to another, it is arguably far too demanding. Unlike the other two options discussed by Kateb, this strategy leaves virtually no room in principle for a defense of cultural pluralism. It insists on the possibility of a single best culture, with the
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minor caveat that a few somewhat distinct cultures might perchance be tied as equally valuable optimal ways of life in terms of the universal standards. Indeed, aesthetic considerations seem to be entirely subservient to moral and epistemic considerations, which are apparently viewed as capable of generating a complete and consistent ranking of all distinct cultures, one to another. An optimal liberal culture at the head of the ranking, a culture in which the status of the individual is fully protected by suitably weighty individual rights, serves at least implicitly as an ideal that should be aspired to by all societies. But why should we think that common standards of truth and morality exist that can justify a complete and consistent ranking of different cultures? Practical reason may be too weak in principle to generate such a ranking. A partial or incomplete ranking of different cultures is another matter. Common standards of truth and morality may well permit us to classify some ways of life as being at least minimally civilized, others as not, and to grade the first (top) set of cultures as being vastly superior to the second (bottom) set. There may be universal standards, in other words, which do apply to all cultures but which do not permit us to grade or rank all cultures, one to another. Instead of a complete and consistent ranking, the common standards of practical reason produce an incomplete ranking such that all cultures in the top set are judged superior to all cultures in the bottom set, yet cultures within the top set are incomparable to each other and thus cannot be ranked, one to another (the same may be true of cultures within the bottom set). If this is right, reasonable cultural pluralism will be found within the top set (and perhaps within the bottom set) at the same time that common moral judgments rank every culture in the top set as being superior to every way of life in the bottom set. Moreover, aesthetic considerations might reaffirm this two-tier structure such that all those cultures in the top set are viewed as incommensurably valuable forms of the beautiful, all those in the bottom set as incommensurably disvaluable forms of the ugly, and common aesthetic judgments (agreeing with the common moral judgments) rank every element of the top set as being vastly more admirable than every element of the bottom set. In short, aesthetic judgments might cooperate with the dictates of practical reason to justify the same incomplete ranking of cultures. Keeping these various points in mind, two somewhat different defenses of limited cultural pluralism can be proposed. They differ solely in terms of how aesthetics is conceived in relation to morality. One defense, which may be referred to as the nonaesthetic defense of limited cultural pluralism, adopts the formalistic view that aesthetic appreciation is unrelated to moral evaluation, in which case aesthetics and morality may exhibit hostility to each other
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as when artworks glorifying evil, and social practices embodying evil, are nonetheless said to be quite beautiful (and sublime). The other defense, which may be termed an integrated (both aesthetic and moral) defense of limited cultural pluralism, rejects the formalistic view in favor of a moralistic approach that sees standards of aesthetic taste as being reasonably constrained by moral considerations such that what is blatantly immoral (in particular, violations of basic human rights) cannot be admired as beautiful (and sublime). A common moral horizon is viewed as being a component of aesthetics itself so that glorification of evil cannot reasonably be admired as art, just as evil social practices cannot reasonably be judged as beautiful and sublime. Given his remarks about Wagners music quoted in the first section, Berlin might not accept the moralistic view that aesthetics is self-constrained by certain ethical considerations that are simultaneously aesthetic.59 So he might well reject the integrated defense of cultural pluralism insofar as it incorporates the moralistic view. Nevertheless, I shall begin with the integrated defense because of its intrinsic interest. It is an option worth taking seriously, even if Berlin himself is more likely to have subscribed to the nonaesthetic defense of limited cultural pluralism, discussed later in this essay (section VII). In this regard, I have already noted that Kant seems to view impartial aesthetic judgments (as opposed to personal feelings of mere agreeableness) as being necessarily compatible with rational morality, even if he acknowledges that humans cannot fully understand how the aesthetic power of judgment is rationally constrained (because it is not constrained by any determinate concepts, including the concept of right) and instead must have faith that the relevant constraints are well-grounded in some noumenal realmsome supersensible substratum of humanitythat is inaccessible to our faculty of cognition.60 Moreover, although he does not endorse Kants a priori rationalism, Hume seems to see ethics as part of aesthetics, at least to the extent that what is evidently immoral cannot be admired as beautiful:
Where any innocent peculiarities of manners are represented [in an artwork such as a poem], they ought certainly to be admitted. . . . But where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another, and where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the proper characters of blame and disapprobation, this must be allowed to disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity. I cannot, nor is it proper I should, enter into such sentiments; and however I may excuse the poet, on account of the manners of the age, I can never relish the composition. . . . And where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard by which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer 61 whatsoever.
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V. THE INTEGRATED DEFENSE The integrated defense of a suitably limited cultural pluralism essentially claims that common considerations of truth, morality, and aesthetic taste combine to support a two-tier structure, of the sort outlined in the previous section, and perhaps more sophisticated structures in which cultures in the top set are partially ranked, one to another. Cultures that fail to recognize or assign due priority to some minimum set of human rights fall below a common moral horizon that is also a common aesthetic one: such cultures are rationally judged by human beings in any social setting to be both unjust and ugly. Cultures that assign suitable priority to these basic rightsrights not to be murdered, tortured, or enslaved, for example, rights to emigrate and rights to at least some degree of freedom of consciencerise above the common moral and aesthetic horizon: such cultures are reasonably judged across social contexts to be (at least minimally) moral as well as worthy of (at least minimal) aesthetic admiration. Given the immense importance assigned by Berlin to (both negative and positive) freedom, it may also be reasonable to conclude that societies ought to advance far beyond the common minimum in the sets of rights that are understood and appreciated as fundamental. Consistently with pluralism, different societies may well progress along their own incommensurably valuable paths by recognizing and giving due priority to their own peculiar bundles of rights in addition to the common minimum. This would allow a partial ranking of some of the different cultures in the top set, to wit, more advanced versions of a particular society would be ranked as superiorboth morally and aesthetically superiorto less advanced versions of itself, where a more advanced society recognizes and gives due priority to all the same rights and then some as its less advanced counterpart. But I shall ignore this possibility in the discussion that follows and concentrate on the straightforward two-tier structure for ease of exposition. Given the moralistic view of the relation between aesthetics and morality (such that the common moral horizon is viewed from within aesthetics itself as a reasonable constraint on aesthetic judgment), aesthetic and moral judgments yield identical partial rankings of different ways of life in the simple two-tier model. All cultures in the top set are incommensurably valuable, one to another, and only one to another: they cannot reasonably be ranked vis--vis each other because there are no common standards for doing so. On the basis of our observation of human conduct across a wide range of civil societies, practical reason has proved incapable of settling these conflicts of values (or systems of values). Indeed, since practical reason is silent as to how to rank different cultures above the common horizon, it is open to the members of any particular society to admire and pick their own social customs and
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practices as maximally suited to their own peculiar tastes. There may simply be no answer to the question of how to rationally grade or rank any two cultures in the top set, all things (aesthetic and moral) considered. Any one of this plurality of incommensurably valuable cultures within the top set is reasonably viewed as being fit for human beings, as comporting with our common humanity, even if particular societies view their own cultures as most suitable for themselves. At the same time, all cultures in the bottom set may be incommensurably disvaluable, one to another, and only one to another. Although they may be incomparable to each other, however, all of them are rationally vetoed as being ugly and immoral, and thus unfit for human beings, false to our common core of human decency. The integrated defense of limited cultural pluralism is arguably free of the serious objections attaching to the three options allowed by Kateb. Unlike the aesthetic defense of pluralism, for example, the integrated strategy does not claim that aesthetic appreciation and practical reasoning are mutually exclusive activities. Rather, it claims that they coincide to some degree. Aesthetic appreciation as applied to cultures or ways of life does involve some common core of concepts and categories that are simultaneously aesthetic and moral. According to these common ideas, there are some social practices that are at once so blatantly immoral and deformed as not to be worthy of any aesthetic appreciation by human beings. The ideas authorize common aesthetic judgments that each of these degrading ways of life must in good taste be ranked below every culture that meets at least minimum standards of beauty that are common to every decent culture. The minimum aesthetic standards allegedly coincide with minimum moral standards, including the moral priority of certain basic individual rights over competing considerations. Despite the coincidence between aesthetic and moral judgments to this extent, however, neither aesthetic appreciation nor practical reason is commonly seen as being capable of comparing distinct cultures that rise above the common moral and aesthetic threshold: these incommensurably valuable objects cannot be graded or ranked, one to another. Unlike the nonaesthetic defense of unlimited pluralism, the integrated strategy does not reduce to cultural relativism. Rather, it embraces certain minimum criteria of truth, morality, and beauty which are widely affirmed as reasonable across different cultures or ways of life. Different cultures can be graded and ranked consistently, even if only partially, one to another, in terms of the relevant criteria. Finally, unlike an aggressive defense of universal standards of truth and morality, which insists that such standards are sufficiently powerful to generate a complete and consistent ranking of all ways of life, the integrated strategy offers a more humble defense of universal minimum standards of truth,
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morality and beauty, which many different cultures satisfy but which many do not, giving rise to a partial ranking of cultures such that every culture that meets the standards is ranked above every culture that fails to meet them. The common minimum standards do not induce a complete and consistent ranking of all cultures. Rather, they leave room for a plurality of acceptable yet incommensurably valuable cultures, each of which comports with the minimum standards (by protecting basic individual rights) yet which also may augment them in some distinctive way that has peculiar value to the particular society.
VI. AESTHETICS AND MORALITY The integrated defense claims that aesthetic judgment coincides with moral judgment to form a common moral and aesthetic threshold below which cultures are rationally rejected as being ugly and immoral. A notable feature of this defense is that moral values do not need to be assumed to be commensurable with aesthetic values in order that the common moral minimum wins out in cases of conflict. Aesthetic judgment simply does not come into conflict with the minimum morality. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that this element of the integrated defense is controversial. Even if Kant and Hume can be read to support it, the more popular view appears to be that they were incorrect to do so. If aesthetics is conceived in formalistic terms, the integrated defense must be rejected. It is worth isolating two parts of the moralistic claim that aesthetics and morality are unified at least to the minimum degree required by the idea of a common moral and aesthetic horizon. The first is the assertion that there are common criteria of aesthetic taste, according to which ways of life that do not protect even a minimum set of basic human rights should be condemned aesthetically as degraded, tasteless, and ugly. Different ways of life can be rationally compared from within the aesthetic outlook, in other words, such that this bottom set of cultures can be identified and vetoed as aesthetically worthless. But what are the common aesthetic standards in question? The answer seems to be that they are certain common moral standards that are simultaneously aesthetic. A culture or way of life cannot reasonably be considered beautiful (and sublime) on this view unless it recognizes certain basic human rights in its social institutions and practicesand thus exhibits the minimally liberal values allegedly shared by all decent cultures. In short, the culture must display at least a minimally liberal style to have any aesthetic value. The second part of the moralistic claim is the assertion that aesthetics can still be a distinct realm with its own peculiar standards, even if respect for the
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common moral minimum is a component of aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic evaluation involves criteria in addition to respect for the moral minimum, and those other aesthetic values (although they do not conflict with the moral minimum) may be incommensurable with other moral values that are not at the same time aesthetic. Except for their overlap with respect to the minimally liberal values associated with certain basic human rights, in other words, aesthetic standards and moral standards can be separate from, and incomparable with, each other. The ethical component of aesthetics can constrain pure aesthetic judgment to coincide with pure moral judgment in vetoing barbaric ways of life that violate the basic human rights. Since they point in the same direction to that extent, aesthetics and morality cooperate (by what is called dominance reasoning) to generate the same partial ranking of different cultures. But the nonethical components of aesthetic evaluation can otherwise render the realms of aesthetics and morality separate and incommensurable: any two cultures that involve more than some recognized minimum of basic human rights might be judged and ranked one way in terms of criteria of beauty (and sublimity), a different way in terms of moral criteria, and the conflict have no rational resolution. Although the moralistic claim remains open to objection, a couple of points of clarification are in order. The claim that there is a common moral and aesthetic horizon does not deny that a barbaric society that violates basic human rights can produce great artworks and even exhibit particular social practices of great beauty (or sublimity). Once such artworks or practices have been produced, moreover, destruction of them would entail a great loss of aesthetic value. The claim is that, even so, reasonable people will condemn as ugly and immoral any culture or way of life that violates basic human rights in the course of producing great artwork or delightful social manners. Even from within the pure aesthetic outlook, reasonable people would refuse to undertake production of the artwork and the manners if the rights-violations were involved in the production. The ugliness of the practice of violating basic rights outweighs the (potentially considerable) beauty (and sublimity) of any artworks or other social practices made possible by the rights-violations. This all-things-considered aesthetic judgment (coinciding with a common moral judgment) would not lose force if it could be shown that the rights-violations are essential to the production of great art or to the survival of social customs of great beauty (and sublimity). Great art can arguably be produced without violating basic human rights, however, just as allegedly beautiful social customs can be severed from any practice of violating basic rights. In any case, reasonable aesthetes and aestheticians must wait until beautiful artworks and social customs can be produced without trampling on some minimum of human rights.
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As well, there is no need to deny that common standards of (minimum) taste may evolve with common standards of (minimum) morality, including shared understandings of what constitutes the minimum set of basic human rights. For example, it might be speculated that their joint evolution takes place along the following lines. The common moral horizon makes reference to moral rules, reiterated across all civil societies, that prohibit anyone from harming certain vital interests of other human beings, interests that ought to be regarded as human rights and are so regarded (at least implicitly) by any reasonable person. Common aesthetic standards supervene on such common moral rules. In particular, utopias that go well beyond the common moral horizon in their recognition and protection of equal individual rights are commonly imagined by reasonable people as social ideals of great beauty in relation to everyday life. In contrast, dystopias, in which basic rights are violated or far fewer rights are protected than is typically the case under existing social arrangements, are commonly imagined (if not remembered) as being ugly in relation to everyday life. The concrete details of this abstract relationship between what is commonly imagined and what is commonly observed could alter somewhat over time as existing social practices (including recognized basic rights) evolve. Still, nothing that has been said is likely to convert proponents of the received view that aesthetics is independent of morality. To consider an alternative to the integrated defense of limited pluralism, therefore, I shall jettison (without necessarily rejecting) the moralistic claim that aesthetics and morality coincide in vetoing barbaric cultures that do not respect even a minimum of basic human rights. This gives rise to a nonaesthetic defense of cultural pluralism within the limits of a common moral (but not aesthetic) horizon involving security of basic human rights.
VII. THE NONAESTHETIC DEFENSE Unlike the integrated defense, the nonaesthetic defense of limited cultural pluralism adopts the formalistic view of aesthetic judgment and also rejects the possibility of a common aesthetic horizon. From within the aesthetic outlook, then, cultures are incommensurable: a slave system or a Nazi system can be admired or glorified as beautiful (and sublime) despite the presence within it of blatantly immoral practices that violate basic human rights, and its aesthetic value is incomparable to that of even an advanced liberal culture that instantiates a rich set of equal individual rights. Nevertheless, pure aesthetic values are viewed as being secondary in importance to universal moral and epistemic values. A common moral (but not aesthetic) horizon trumps
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aesthetics in cases of conflict: some minimum set of basic human rights must not be violated for any social purposes, including the production of beautiful paintings and music, sublime architecture, or the stylish manners and practices of some social elite. The nonaesthetic defense of limited cultural pluralism does mirror Katebs view that common standards of morality must reign supreme over competing aesthetic considerations to protect at least some minimum of basic human rights. Any conflicts between this universal moral core and ideals of beauty (or sublimity) are rationally resolved in favor of morality.62 As a result, the lack of a common aesthetic horizon does not have any effect on practical judgment. Indeed, to the extent that core moral values are reasonably held to be more important than, and thus comparable with, any conflicting aesthetic values, reasonable people must admit that aesthetic values are indirectly comparable, one to another, in terms of the paramount moral standards. In effect, there is a common aesthetic horizon for rational moral agents, even if no such horizon is apparent from within the formalistic aesthetic outlook itself. Such agents simply ignore the fact that aesthetic values are incomparable, one to another, and impose the common moral horizon on the aesthetic realm. By hypothesis, nobody can object, aside from pure aesthetes and aestheticians who are neither rational nor moral. At the same time, however, practical reason is viewed as being too weak to provide a complete and consistent all-things-considered moral ranking of all distinct cultures, one to another. Rather, the only reasonable ethical ranking is a partial one such that every element of a top set of incommensurably valuable cultures, each of which protects at least some minimum of basic human rights, is judged to be morally superior to every element of a bottom set of barbaric ways of life, each of which does not secure even the minimum of human rights. Given that there is no moral ranking of different cultures in the top set, one to another, there is no question of morality trumping aesthetics in the context of these cultures. It is morally permissible for members of a particular culture in the top set to admire and pick their own culture in preference to other cultures, for example, because their own practices include respect for at least the minimum of basic human rights. Cultural pluralism within the limits of the minimally liberal common moral horizon is compatible with morality and aesthetics. I shall not attempt to decide whether Berlins work comports best with the integrated defense or the nonaesthetic defense of limited cultural pluralism. If forced to choose, I would attribute to him the latter defense because he appears to adopt the formalistic view that aesthetic appreciation is independent of moral judgment. As already indicated in the first section, however, he also seems to think that at least some artists can reasonably be ranked in terms
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of their aesthetic worth, implying that some artworks are comparable in terms of their beauty (and sublimity). Indeed, he even remarks that it is reasonable to reject a culture because one finds it morally or aesthetically repellent [italics added].63 Thus, he apparently would not fully subscribe to the nonaesthetic defense either because (contrary to the assumptions of that defense but not the integrated one) he accepts to some extent the idea of comparability even within the aesthetic realm. Some reasonable comparisons can be made of artworks and putative artworks in terms of beauty (and sublimity), it seems, so that some partial aesthetic rankings are rational. But there is little point in insisting on one defense rather than another of limited pluralism, given that Berlin never discusses with any precision how he conceives aesthetic judgment or its relation to morality. And there is little difference in practice between the two defenses anyway. The key consideration is that he does emphasize certain common moral limits in any case: the common moral horizon, including protection for at least a minimum of basic human rights, reasonably trumps any competing considerations, aesthetic or otherwise. Both defenses are universalist defenses of a broad liberal pluralism, that is, pluralism within at least minimal liberal limits. It may well be asked on what basis Berlin concludes that the common moral horizon has supreme value over competing considerations. In other words, what common measure of value does he rely on to support the claim that cultures in the top set can be rationally compared to those in the bottom set such that each of the former is allegedly more valuable than any of the latter? Why is it reasonable to say that, all things considered, any culture that respects some minimum of basic human rights should invariably be preferred by human beings to any way of life that does not? Of course, various avenues are open to Berlin at this point. But he is typically ambiguous about which avenue he chooses. Still, he does hint at the possibility of a suitably restricted utilitarian avenue, according to which the relative superiority of any culture in the top set can be inferred on the basis of general human welfare: Utilitarian solutions are sometimes wrong, he says,
but, I suspect, more often beneficent. The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situa64 tions, of intolerable choicesthat is the first requirement for a decent society.
VIII. CONCLUSION: BERLINS LIBERALISM Either of the two defenses of limited pluralism might be renamed as a liberal defense or, strictly speaking, a minimal liberal defense. At the heart of
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both is the claim that a way of life must recognize and assign due priority to at least some minimum set of human rightssome core of basic rights constitutive of minimal liberalismbefore that way of life can reasonably be said to be to any degree moral, decent, or true to our humanity. The integrated defense adds that minimal liberalism in this sense is also necessary before a way of life can be appreciated as beautiful (and sublime) from within a purely aesthetic outlook. If this constraint on aesthetic appreciation is disputed, however, it can be jettisoned, leaving the nonaesthetic defense to hold sway. In my view, whatever his views on aesthetics and its relation to morality, Berlin does insist on minimal liberalism as a binding constraint on the legitimate scope of pluralism.65 More needs to be said, of course, about the common moral horizon (including the minimum set of human rights) used to determine whether any particular culture or way of life is either barbaric or at least minimally liberal. Berlin is certainly not precise about the content of the fundamental rights that must be recognized to escape from barbarism, for example, or about the methods of inquiry needed to identify them. But perhaps a lot should not be made of this. No reasonable moral agent can deny that every human being in every social context has vital interests in subsistence, in not being attacked by others, in freedom from arbitrary arrest and enslavement, in freedom to emigrate, and in at least some degree of freedom of thought and expression, for example, and that these vital interests ought to be protected for all by powerful equal rights. The moral force of such basic rights is not contingent on their recognition by the laws and customs of a given society. Today, these rights are widely endorsed around the civilized world. But this has arguably always been the case, although with important caveats. One caveat is that the range of the civilized world was more restricted in the past than it is today and perhaps will be in the future. This is just another way of saying that, although any given group escapes from barbarism when enough of its members become reasonable moral agents, the number of such civilized groups is not fixed but rather has grown over time. The other caveat is that the common idea of any humans vital interests may become more precise and richer in content as the range of civilization expands. As more and more people become reasonable moral agents, that is, the list of interests that are commonly believed to require basic protection may be refined and expanded because these agents become better acquainted with the great diversity of circumstances in which different human beings find themselves.66 Such basic protections for humanity seem to be of ancient origin, even if rights-talk is not, having found expression in the idea of natural law of which (as Leszek Kolakowski suggests) the idea of human rights is arguably a modern version.67 For much of recorded history, it appears, reasonable moral peo-
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ple have been struggling for the legal and customary recognition of a minimum set of protections for individual humans as such, even if the protections can only be described in general terms whose concrete details must typically be specified in different ways by different local cultures, and even if local cultures have not always been as ready as they should be to extend the protections to peaceful strangers as fellow human beings. In effect, embryonic norms of liberal justice in the sense of basic human rights have been there from the beginning, transcending cultural particularity.68 This is not to deny the influence of particular traditions and religions on the local understanding, expression, and even scope of application of such norms at any point of time. Moreover, particular cultures may well recognize their own peculiar bundles of rights in addition to those commonly viewed as belonging to the essential minimum, giving rise to many different decent cultures that can be viewed as incommensurably valuable from a common liberal perspective.69 Berlins liberalism as I have interpreted it differs from Katebs liberalism, it seems, in perhaps one significant way. Berlin defends limited cultural pluralism above a common moral horizon that requires respect for the priority of at least some minimum set of basic individual rights. Such respect for basic rights is rationally required as a minimum requirement of justice if not also as a necessary condition for any groups way of life to be worthy of aesthetic appreciation by human beings. Kateb, on the other hand, seems at times to want to extinguish cultural pluralism in favor of strong universal principles of morality and truth in terms of which all cultures can be graded and ranked, with an ideal liberal democratic way of life receiving top marks and serving as a prototype for all cultures to emulate. To be fair, I am not sure that Kateb really intends to mount such an aggressive defense of liberalism. In any case, it is the aggressive defense, not the liberalism, which divides him from Berlin, if anything significant does. Someone might object that an aggressive defense of liberalism has much to recommend it and that, in particular, Berlin makes no convincing case for the claim that humans must abandon in principle the possibility of achieving a single advanced liberal democratic way of life that is best for humans as such. This objection may well have force. But it does not invalidate Berlins claim to be a liberal. At best, it would show that he is overly pessimistic about the possibility of justifying an ideal liberal way of life as being superior in comparison to all cultural alternatives. Moreover, even utilitarian liberals such as Mill, who must in principle subscribe to the possibility of an ideal liberal culture in which the general happiness of human beings would be maximized, can advocate a wide degree of cultural pluralism for the foreseeable
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future, for want of the highly developed capacities for rational decision making as well as the rich utility information needed to make utility comparisons of the many different liberal ways of life that meet or exceed the common moral threshold. The utilitarian liberal can subscribe to a two-tier structure rather similar to the one that I have used to illustrate Berlins work. Rather than insist that the different ways of life in the top set are incommensurably valuable, one to another, however, the utilitarian liberal views them as equally valuable so far as human beings can presently determine in light of our fallibility and lack of knowledge.
NOTES
1. For a recent review of the literature, see Michael Kenny, Isaiah Berlins Contribution to Modern Political Theory, Political Studies 48 (December 2000): 1026-39. 2. George Kateb, Can Cultures Be Judged? Two Defenses of Cultural Pluralism in Isaiah Berlins Work, Social Research 66, no. 4 (winter 1999): 1009-38 at 1036-37. 3. See John Gray, Berlin (London: Fontana, 1995); and Gray, Where Pluralists and Liberals Part Company, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 6, no. 1 (1998): 17-36. 4. I am using the terms rationalist and rationalism in a broad sense, as Berlin himself seems to use them, to cover any thinker who holds that fundamental moral and political principles (such as principles of basic rights) can be justified in terms of rational choice. No commitment is implied to mainstream rationalist claims that humans are endowed with an omnipotent faculty of Reason that is capable of intuiting solutions to all conflicts of values. Moreover, my argument that Berlin is ultimately a liberal rationalist does not imply that he ignores nonrational religious motivations or that his pluralistic liberalism cannot make any room for them. As he says at one point, If people didnt have deep irrational feelings in them there would be no religion, no art, no love. None of these things are justifiable by purely rational means (Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes, Salmagundi 120 (Fall 1998): 52-134 at 113). Nonrational feelings may well lead us to make some choices rather than others when we cannot reasonably decide one way or the other. But Kateb is incorrect to think that Berlin is so committed to nonrational elements that he would allow violations of basic liberal rights. You cant deprive human beings of certain basic rights as human beings, Berlin emphasizes (ibid., 111). 5. George Kateb, Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility, Political Theory 28, no. 1 (February 2000): 5-37. 6. Kateb, Can Cultures Be Judged? 1009. 7. Ibid., 1010. 8. Kateb, Aestheticism and Morality, 6. 9. Ibid., 19. Kateb says that despite all denials and failures of recognition, some part of the passion for religious faith, for the preservation or expansion of a way of life or a solidary group identity, for politics as an end in itself, for the project of masculinity, for acquiring the pleasures of a symbolic life, for rising in the world as a great individual, or, finally, for saving nature from the predatory verminous human race is aesthetic. (p. 11)
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For further discussion of the way aesthetic motives help to animate pursuit of [these various] ideals . . . that are loved more than morality or are so loved that the moral cost does not break into consciousness with any force, see pp. 6-19. 10. Ibid., 6. 11. Ibid., 21. 12. Ibid., 24-30. Kateb also discusses briefly a kind of deliberate philosophical aestheticism that advocates the idea that the self should aspire to satisfy aesthetic criteria, should aspire to be worthy of aesthetic attitudes and feelings, and should aim to be beautiful or sublime in some sense or other (p. 28). He mentions Foucault, among others, as advocating this sort of ideal. He recognizes that a deliberate aestheticism of the self within moral limits is possible, as Mill arguably advocated in On Liberty (1859). But he suggests that pure aestheticism need not respect any such limits: The preponderant tendency, however, in those who want a self to be like a work of art or a life to be like a well-made story, is . . . to see indifference to or disregard of morality as aesthetically indispensable. Morality makes ugly through its self-examination, through scruples, inhibitions, and second thoughts. (Pp. 29-30) As well, he suggests that Arendt tries to transform political phenomena into aesthetic phenomena in a way that subordinates morality. See George Kateb, The Judgment of Arendt, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2, no. 108 (1999): 133-54. 13. See, for example, Marcia M. Eaton, Kantian and Contextual Beauty, Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000), 27-36 at 28. 14. For Kants theory of aesthetic judgment, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (1790; reprint, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 87-230. Kants remarks in sections 11-14 (pp. 106-11) seem to support the popular conception of his aesthetics as formalism. For Guyers claim that this formalism is not justified, see Editors Introduction (pp. xxix-xxx). Kant does distinguish between aesthetic judgment, which he thinks is impartial and communicable to other rational human beings, and moral judgment, which he thinks is impartial and universalizable across human beings. But any claim that he thinks pure aesthetic judgment could come into serious conflict with morality is quite dubious. For him, it seems, aesthetic judgment must (as a matter of a priori rational necessity) cooperate with moral judgment, such that beauty for humans is symbolic of human morality. See, especially, section 17 (pp. 116-20), section 42 (pp. 178-82), and sections 55-60 (pp. 213-30). As Guyer remarks, Ultimately it seems that Kant can only believe that the cultivation of taste and the development of morality are mutually reinforcing (Editorial Notes, 387-88, n. 19; cf. Editors Introduction, xxxv). 15. The formalistic view allows that aesthetics and morality might cooperate despite their potential to display hostility toward one another. For this to happen, however, aesthetics must be seen to be less important than morality in cases of conflict. As pointed out earlier (note 12), Kateb also discusses deliberate philosophical aestheticisms that aspire to remake society in accord with aesthetic ideals within moral limits: aestheticism and morality would ideally perfect each other (Aesthetics and Morality, 27). Indeed, he advocates a democratic aestheticism that would cooperate with democratic morality and politics: democratic aestheticism tries to make cravings for beauty and sublimity in human relations conscious of themselves as aesthetic and to curb them for the sake of morality (p. 31). See also George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 16. Kateb, Can Cultures Be Judged? 1011. 17. Ibid., 1020.
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18. Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 157-63. 19. William Galston, Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory, American Political Science Review 93 (December 1999): 769-78 at 771-72. 20. Kateb, Can Cultures Be Judged? 1021. Berlins alleged renunciation of aesthetic judgment does not imply that he renounces aesthetic choice, that is, choosing one culture in preference to another. An aesthete may well pick one culture rather than another as the focus of his admiration, despite the lack of any common standard for grading different cultures in terms of their beauty. Moreover, by picking one rather than another, he implicitly reveals a preference ranking between the two. But such a ranking has no basis in practical reason. There is no common aesthetic measure that permits rational comparisons of different cultures, one to another. In other words, one culture cannot reasonably be judged more beautiful than another. 21. Ibid., 1022. 22. Ibid. Kateb may not mean to imply that standards of morality are incommensurable with standards of truth. In any case, the implication is not essential to the radical aesthetic defense of pluralism that he attributes to Berlin. It is sufficient for the aesthetic defense that standards of beauty are incommensurable with the other standards, whether or not the others are commensurable with each other. 23. Ibid., 1021-22. Similarly, the claims of morality and truth are not primary and fit to be superordinated for the sake of destroying or suppressing aesthetic appreciation of a way of life. 24. Ibid., 1022. 25. Ibid. Actually, despite Katebs claim, a radical aesthete or aesthetician might argue that the idea of incommensurability can be maintained within the aesthetic realm even if the plural and incommensurable aesthetic values are commensurable with the values of morality and truth. True, a reasonable person would have to admit that aesthetic values are indirectly comparable with each other in terms of the values of morality and truth (to which, by assumption, all aesthetic values may be directly compared). Nevertheless, might not the radical aesthete simply dismiss morality and truth? Rather than claim to be a reasonable person who cares about morality and its true importance in relation to aesthetics, he or she may revel in the alleged incommensurables of a purely formalistic aesthetic realm and ignore everything else. 26. Ibid., 1023. 27. Ibid., 1023-24. 28. Ibid., 1024. It should be emphasized that Berlin conceives pluralism and incommensurability also extending within the constellation of values comprising any culture. Thus, the style of any particular culture may itself involve conflicts of incommensurable values that cannot be rationally resolved. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 1025. 31. Ibid., 1015-16, 1025. 32. Ibid., 1025. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 1026. 35. Ibid. 36. Berlin in Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 118. 37. Ibid. See also 193-94. 38. See, e.g., ibid., 96-99. 39. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1969), x-xxiii. See also Berlin in Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 148.
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40. As indicated earlier in the text, Kateb suggests that many people and thinkers get so carried away by aesthetic cravings as to be largely unaware of the immoral implications of focusing so much attention on beauty and sublimity. In Aestheticism and Morality, he claims that unconscious aestheticism is responsible for a substantial amount of the worlds wickedness (p. 11). Berlin, if he is in the grip of such an indeliberate aestheticism, might be more or less innocently neglecting the moral costs of his aesthetic outlook: the innocence may show itself in unconsciousness of immorality or in a rationalization that denies immorality or makes it marginal or that expressly asserts that there are considerations of greater importance than morality (p. 6). It does not seem that Berlin can properly be regarded as a philosophical aesthete who has deliberately decide[d], after serious thought and not in the grip of cravings, that beauty and sublimity (received with the proper attitudes and feelings), even when implicated in immorality, are more important, more commensurate with the human stature, and more conducive to human vitality or happiness [italics added] than is morality (or truth). (p. 23) After all, Berlin apparently subscribes to the thesis of double incommensurability. Kateb may be suggesting, then, that Berlin is in the grip of an unconscious aestheticism that drives him to employ the idea of incommensurability to ignore or rationalize the moral costs of his outlook. 41. Kateb, Can Cultures Be Judged? 1009. 42. Ibid., 1027. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 1028. 45. Ibid., 1029-30. 46. Ibid., 1030-32. 47. Ibid., 1032. 48. Ibid., 1033. 49. Ibid., 1034. 50. Ibid. Kateb remarks that Arendt, despite her tendency to transform political phenomena into aesthetic phenomena in a way that subordinated morality, similarly appeals to certain moral standards to condemn the evil of totalitarian politics. See Kateb, The Judgment of Arendt, 152-54. But he treats her case quite differently than Berlins. In his view, her aesthetic judgment continues to operate insofar as she appreciates the truly novel and creative evil of totalitarian systems, thereby refusing to classify Naziism and Stalinism [as] only somewhat exaggerated versions of immemorial tyrannies or despotisms. But her aesthetic judgment becomes secondary as she endorses the moral sense of those who resist such evil: in the face of great evil, the repressed moral sense, the plain moral sense, reasserts itself and exacts its revenge on political aestheticism. Significantly, Kateb suggests that the moral sense is shored up by aestheticized judgment in Arendts case (p. 154). Yet he does not pursue this line in Berlins case. Rather, Berlin is viewed as renounc[ing] aesthetic judgment (Can Cultures Be Judged? 1021). Moreover, in the nonaesthetic defense under discussion, Berlin is viewed as renouncing common standards of morality and truth as well. Katebs asymmetric treatment of these two thinkers is due, apparently, to Berlins use of the idea of incommensurability. 51. Kateb, Can Cultures Be Judged? 1035. 52. Ibid., 1037. 53. Ibid., 1012. 54. Riley, Interpreting Berlins Liberalism, American Political Science Review 95 (June 2001): 283-95. 55. Galston, Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory, 770, referring to H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1961).
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56. Steven Lukes, The Singular and the Plural: On the Distinctive Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin, Social Research 61, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 687-717 at 714. 57. Eaton, Kantian and Contextual Beauty, 34. 58. For a recent critique of various types of relativism, see Michael J. Perry, The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 57-86. 59. The moralistic view can be weakened such that it is virtually indistinguishable in practice from the received view of the relation between aesthetics and morality. A weak moralistic view might say that immorality detracts from aesthetic appreciation without being sufficient to determine an all-things-considered aesthetic judgment, for example. An artwork or putative artwork could still be admired as quite beautiful all-things-considered, despite its association with evil, and even though it might reasonably be thought to be potentially more beautiful if the link with evil could be severed. For interesting discussions along these lines, see Berys Gaut, The Ethical Criticism of Art, Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182-203; and Mary Devereaux, Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will, Levinson, Aesthetics and Ethics, 227-56. As extended to social practices regarded as if they were artworks, such all-things-considered aesthetic judgments could still be held to be outweighed by pure moral judgments in cases of conflict, provided moral values are assumed to be comparable to aesthetic ones. 60. See Kant, Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, 213-30 (sec. 55-60). 61. David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1963), 231-55 at 252-53. See also Humes distinction between delicacy of taste (which seems to depend on cultivation of the moral sentiments) and delicacy of passion in his Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion, Essays, 3-7. 62. Kateb makes clear that he thinks that even democratic aesthetic values are secondary to common moral values in cases of conflict. In his view, democratic aestheticism bestows a rather promiscuous attention and appreciation on as much as possible (however ugly or supposedly ugly the person or thing in question is): by making everyone and everything worthy of attention and hence of one or another of the aesthetic feelings, it checks the tendency to condemnation and punishment (Aesthetics and Morality, 34). As such, democratic aestheticism remains in serious tension with common morality. When faced with grave evil and injustice, the practitioners of democratic aestheticism must abandon their aestheticism for the morality of condemnation and punishment. The original moral motive reclaims [them] (p. 34). 63. Isaiah Berlin, Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Knopf, 1991), 87. 64. Isaiah Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal, Crooked Timber, 17-18. At times, however, Berlin also expresses unease with utilitarian reasoning, and seems attracted to a Kantian outlook in which basic rights are justified in terms of respect for human dignity as such, independently of the consequences for human welfare. See, for example, Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes, 106-12. 65. Berlin makes a number of explicit statements to this effect. See, for example, Lukes, The Singular and the Plural, 711-14; Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes, 111-23; and Riley, Interpreting Berlins Liberalism, p. 291. 66. It is an open question today whether some minimum set of basic protections ought to be extended to all sentient beings, not merely humans. 67. Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 214; quoted by Perry, The Idea of Human Rights, 3. Kolakowski suggests that the idea of human rights is of timeless validity. Brian Tierney has argued that the language of natural (or human) rights can be traced back to at least the twelfth century. See Tierney, Religion, Law and
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the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150-1650 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Tierney, Tuck on Rights: Some Medieval Problems, History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 429-41; and Tierney, Origins of Natural Rights Language: Texts and Contexts, 1150-1250, History of Political Thought 10 (1989): 615-46. 68. It may be objected that the term minimal liberalism is too encompassing, and that the term liberal should be confined to relatively advanced cultures and ways of life in which far more rights are recognized than some minimum set of human rights. John Rawls, for example, proposes a minimum set of human rights that he apparently views as sufficient for a decent society yet not sufficient for true liberalism. See Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 529-64 at 544-55. I view this as being largely a semantic issue. Given that a society must recognize some minimum set of basic individual rights to count as decent, I simply equate decency with minimal liberalism without denying the possibility of more advanced liberal cultures. Rawls has his own reasons for emphasizing a distinction between decent liberal and decent nonliberal cultures; in particular, he wishes to make a case that a liberal theory of justice like his can appeal to decent nonliberal peoples outside what he considers the Western tradition. But, of course, he has no monopoly on the term liberalism. Moreover, it is arguably a mistake to narrowly insist that liberalism vanishes in the absence of democratic citizenship. In any case, as I interpret him, Berlin can affirm that more advanced liberal cultures (or what for Rawls are the only truly liberal cultures) are superior to minimally liberal versions of themselves, despite his insistence on a plurality of incommensurably valuable cultures. So his liberal rationalism would remain intact even if we adopted Rawlss view that there can be decent societies that are nonliberal despite their protection of some set of basic human rights. 69. Michael J. Perry, in The Idea of Human Rights, provides a useful discussion of the transcultural validity of the idea of human rights. For further discussion of these themes, see, for example, Daniel A. Bell, The Limits of Liberal Justice, Political Theory 26, no. 4 (August 1998): 557-82; Evan Charney, Cultural Interpretation and Universal Human Rights: A Response to Bell, Political Theory 27, no. 6 (December 1999): 840-48; and Daniel A. Bell, Which Rights Are Universal? Political Theory 27, no. 6 (December 1999): 849-56.
Jonathan Riley teaches in both the Department of Philosophy and the Murphy Institute of Political Economy, Tulane University, and is a visiting 2000-1 Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University. He is the author of Mills Radical Liberalism (Routledge, forthcoming), and is currently completing three separate book projects on, respectively, pluralistic liberalisms (comparing Berlin, Rawls, and Mill), a liberal utilitarian theory of justice, and freedom of speech from a Millian perspective.

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POLITICAL Riley / DEFENDING THEORY CULTURAL / February 2002 PLURALISM

DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM Within Liberal Limits

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

Riley / DEFENDING CULTURAL PLURALISM

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002

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